Beginning the 2024-2025 school year, all students in Year 2 of Kindergarten through Grade 2 in Ontario will participate in early reading screenings (ERS). This requirement by the Ministry of Education was in response to the聽聽and is endorsed by the聽.
What is Early Reading Screening (ERS)?
Early Reading Screenings are quick checks of your child鈥檚 reading skills.
Why ERS?
Reading is a key skill for your child鈥檚 success in school and beyond. Early reading screening helps us understand each child鈥檚 reading skills and identify areas where additional support may be needed. The results will not affect your child鈥檚 grades but rather provide valuable insights to guide classroom instruction.
What Will the Screening Involve?
The screenings will be done one-on-one with your child at the beginning of the school year. They will include simple activities like identifying letters and sounds or sounding out words. No special preparation is needed.
Our screening will look at skills like:
- Recognizing letters and their sounds
- Blending sounds to make words
- Understanding basic words and sentences
Communicating Results
Acadience, a Ministry-approved tool, was used to administer the screenings during the first months of school. The results of these screenings will be communicated in your child鈥檚 February report card (Kindergarten Communication of Learning or Elementary Provincial Report Card).
Your child鈥檚 results will indicate whether the benchmark was met. Benchmarks are obtained through a series of subtests, each providing an individual score linked to a specific measure that assesses essential literacy skills (refer to this聽). These measures vary by grade and time of year to match grade-level expectations. The individual scores are combined into a composite score, which helps predict future reading abilities. Benchmark levels are categorized as At/Above Benchmark, Below Benchmark, or Well Below Benchmark (refer to this聽). If your child鈥檚 score is below the benchmark, tiered support will largely be provided through whole-class and small-group instruction within the regular literacy blocks.
Valid and Reliable Data
The screening process with Acadience is built around benchmark levels that are research-determined. These levels are reliable because they provide consistent results over time across different conditions. They are also valid because they accurately measure essential literacy skills as intended. Additionally, the Acadience screenings are standardized assessments, meaning they are administered and scored in exactly the same way every time for every student.